'George Lucas' in Hyannis is geeky fun

Thursday

Aug 28, 2014 at 11:02 AMAug 28, 2014 at 11:16 AM

Written by, directed by, and starring New Classics Company founders Brett Burkhardt, Matt Kohler, and Justin Jay Gray, the production is a frenzied tour through Lucas’ highs and lows, one staged with obvious love, though colored by a fair amount of frustration.

Conor Powers-Smith csmith@wickedlocal.com

HYANNIS - Few figures in the history of film have elicited as much love, hate, and various mixtures of the two as legendary writer/director George Lucas, creator and co-creator, respectively, of the original “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” trilogies, as well as the widely reviled later entrants in those series. Among people of a certain age, Lucas’ name is capable of drawing both nostalgic sighs and derisive eye-rolls, often in a single conversation.

“I’ve Got a Bad Feeling About This: A Tribute to George Lucas,” playing at the Guyer Barn in Hyannis Thursday through Sunday, Aug. 28 to 31, captures all that ambivalence, as well as the devotion underlying it. Written by, directed by, and starring New Classics Company founders Brett Burkhardt, Matt Kohler, and Justin Jay Gray, the production is a frenzied tour through Lucas’ highs and lows, one staged with obvious love, though colored by a fair amount of frustration.

The central conceit works well. Three fans of Lucas stage a whirlwind reenactment of his best-known blockbusters for a tribute video intended for the filmmaker himself. Frequent squabbles, manic costume changes, and no-budget approximations of million-dollar special effects are all justified, and often funny. Burkhardt, Kohler, and Gray are born performers, each with his own distinct energy to contribute to the versatile and complementary whole.

The structure mirrors that of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged),” a comic, three-person piece originally staged by the Reduced Shakespeare Company, and performed last year by Burkhardt, Kohler, and Gray. “Complete Works” encourages improvisation and experimentation, as well as the use of hyperbolic versions of the performers’ own personalities, all of which fed the creation of “Bad Feeling.”

The template does become restrictive at times, with the script getting bogged down in the mission of reenacting every memorable scene from Lucas’ films, at the expense of its own momentum. The sense of inventiveness and unpredictability the play often achieves might have been maintained more consistently by the use of a wider variety of formats, as in the case of “Complete Works,” in which, for example, Shakespeare’s histories are represented by a football game played with the British crown, and the cannibalistic content of “Titus Andronicus” leads to its presentation as a cooking show.

And just as an average audience member may not pick up on every allusion in a play encapsulating the entire lifework of Shakespeare, many who attend “Bad Feeling” will likely miss more than one of its many, many references, to films obscure (“THX 1138”), infamous (“Howard the Duck”), or forgettable (“Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”).

The light side to that dark side, though, is that truly devoted Lucas fans will find, in “Bad Feeling,” two hours of nostalgic, contagious, even cathartic, fun. The most playful moments are also the best, as when the audience is given crude asteroids to hurl at the escaping Millennium Falcon, or Kohler, simultaneously playing Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi, engages in a heated lightsaber duel with himself.

It’s the same submergence in the realm of imagination that has led countless kids, for several generations running, to contrive pitched battles with “Star Wars” action figures, or to commandeer their sisters’ jump ropes for use as Indy’s whip. “Bad Feeling” is, at it core, a childishly simple, childishly honest tribute.